Irene Handl
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| Irene Handl | |
 Irene Handl in the 1966 BBC TV comedy Mums Boys
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| Born | 27 December 1901 Maida Vale, London, England, UK |
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| Died | 29 November 1987 (aged 85) Kensington, London, England, UK |
Irene Handl (27 December 1901 – 29 November 1987) was an English film actress noted for her comic and character parts.
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[edit] Life
Irene Handl was born in Maida Vale, London, the daughter of an Austrian banker father and French mother. She took to acting at the relatively advanced age of 36, and studied at the acting school run by the sister of Dame Sybil Thorndike. She made her London stage debut in February 1937. She went on to appear in over a hundred British films in supporting roles, mostly comedy character parts such as slightly eccentric mothers, grannies, landladies and servants. In the early 1980s, she played Nan in the ITV children's comedy show Metal Mickey.
[edit] Films
Handl had very minor roles in such landmark films as Spellbound and Brief Encounter. Her notable appearances included I'm All Right Jack as the wife of Peter Sellers' union leader Fred Kite, Tony Hancock's landlady in The Rebel and Sherlock Holmes' housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. She had small roles in two of the Carry On series (Nurse and Constable).
[edit] Television
On television she appeared as a guest in a number of comedy series, notably as a regular in the 1958 series Educating Archie and later in Maggie and Her (1978) opposite Julia McKenzie. She appeared in a rare aristocratic role in Mapp and Lucia and as another aristocratic character in Eric Sykes' 1979 re-make of The Plank where her chauffer was played by Brian Murphy.
Her last appearance was in the BBC sitcom In Sickness and in Health in 1987. She died in Kensington, London later that year. She never married. It is noted in the published diaries of Kenneth Williams that Handl appeared and/or was in the audience of an episode of the magazine programme "Wogan" in 1987 (being hosted by Williams, as happened periodically) and that Handl was in a wheelchair. He recalls just a few days later that Handl had passed away. The fact that her appearance in In Sickness and in Health is credited as her final role is no doubt due to it being screened after her death.
In addition to her acting career, she wrote two successful novels: The Sioux (1965) and The Gold Tip Pfizer (1966).
Intriguingly, as the writer Tony Barrell has pointed out (London Sunday Times, January 1, 2006), Handl was born on exactly the same day as another famous actress, Marlene Dietrich. Though they played very different parts, both were educated at all-girls schools and had connections with Noël Coward.
